A great quantity of products such as newspapers are sold in free standing vending machines. A typical newspaper vending machine has an enclosure into which a stack of newspapers is inserted, a door for access to the stack of newspapers, and a latch on the door which is released upon the insertion of coins in the proper amount into a coin receptor. Unfortunately, however, a customer who has deposited the correct coins into the receptor and has opened the enclosure door, may if he sees fit, remove all the newspapers in the enclosure. The theft of newspapers from such machines is common, but nonetheless, such machines are the most commonly used machines for vending newspapers.
Many existing machines do not have transparent windows enabling a customer to see the product within, and consequently, he may deposit coins into a machine and find that he has lost his money. Furthermore, existing machines are subject to tampering and could easily be used to conceal explosives or poisons which would harm a customer when he opens the enclosure. The risk to the public as a result of tampering is believed to have restricted the use of such machines in recent months.
Efforts have been made to provide a vending machine which will dispense a single newspaper in response to the receipt of the proper coinage in a coin receptor. One example of such machines are Utiger U.S. Pat. No. 2,926,814 in which a rotating claw is used to hook the end copy of a row the newspaper arranged on end, and to flip it to a dispensing chute.
A second example is Deane U.S. Pat. No. 3,136,451 which discloses a machine having an enclosure for receiving a stack of newspapers which are piled upon a moveable tray which removes the lower most newspaper to a dispensing slot upon receipt of proper coins in a coin receptor.
Newspaper dispensing devices, such as shown by Utiger and Deane, have generally been unsuccessful and are infrequently used because the thickness and weight of a newspaper will vary widely from issue to issue, and consequently such machines can not reliable dispense a single copy of a newspaper. As a result, the machine first described which relies upon the trust of the customer remains in wide use. The industry is, therefore, in need of a tamper proof dispensing machine which would reliably dispense a single copy of a newspaper regardless of its thickness and weight.